You know John was always presented as a very young man. The tradition had it that he was 15. And it wasn't to displease Leonardo, who has you know, was leaning pretty hard toward young men...
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I now have to suppose my English is much much worst than I ever have envisioned!
I know there always were transgenderism, MacShreach! And in almost every country, everywhere in the world! I myself am partly huron Indian and I know very well about everything surrounding the berdache. I’m NOT talking about that! What I’m saying is exactly on this line: we know there has always been transvestites and surely transsexuals, but nowhere in any type of iconographic records do you ever see anyone looking as feminine as some of the young men we see today -and I don't mean t-women: men. NOWHERE! We would see it; we would have the data, the images; we would know! Nowhere in the literature do you have any mention of very credible and passable transvestites. Even in the Greek society, which was very free with homosexuality and quite free with such cases of transgenderism, the mentions we have shows how ridicule these transvestites were to the eye of people in general. Aristophanes, for instance, with one of his character in “The Thesmophorias”. In the photographic records, you can only find very few remotely passable individuals before about the 50s. And more and more and ever more since then. There’s a few representations in art, but usually, these representations obviously shows adolescents, like Verrochio’s David, for instance. On the contrary, we are told and reminded that in theatre, in the West, teenagers had to play the roles of females when women were forbidden, before somewhere in the 17th century, for the play to be realistic and enjoyable. Same thing in Japan and in the Chinese opera. In Japan men eventually replaced teens, but quite a bit closer to our time.
There is something totally new here: naturally very feminine men; biologically or physically or morphologically. It can only be a biological phenomenon.
One more thing you should be careful about, MacShreach, is the link you’re making between religious figures. Yes, Cybele is a fertility goddess from Turkish (today) origins, and her priests were castrating themselves. But you can’t confuse sacred prostitution with the lives of the priests, who were the gardian of the cult and not prostitutes themselves. Women were prostituting themselves around many temples in Ancient times; it doesn’t have any direct relation to the cult of Cybele. You link Cybele to the Summerian goddess Inana, but nothing seems to indicate that one came from the other. They were both fertility goddesses with very different attributes. You also linked Inana to Ishtar, somewhere else: Ishtar is the Assyrian goddess of love and war, that absorbed Inana after the conquest of Mesopotamia, and also integrated her attributes, but the second doesn’t come from the first. You even went as far as relating Cybele with Isis! The Egyptian genius was by much fertile enough to produce its own mythology, you know. Besides, Isis came from the myth of the resurrected god Osiris, who had more to do at the time with fertility and the Nile than Isis herself. The myth of Osiris and the practices related to it were in place 26 hundred years BC. In fact, Isis only became a prominent goddess much later, when Osiris was transform into Sarapis, during the hellenistic period. She then developed a large following and later on, the famous Mysteries which probably influenced the birth of Christianity, with other Mysteries cults. Yes, the places where the “black virgins” were celebrated were converted by Catholicisim into “Notre Dame” churches and the same imagery (Isis mother with the infant Horus) adopted for the Virgin Mary.
The link you finally establish between Batchura Mata and Cybele is interesting, but quite immoderate. Once again, it’s not as if the mythology of North India was not fertile enough in itself. In the case of Cybele, it’s her lover that spills his blood by castrating himself; on the contrary, Batchura Mata cuts her breasts. The obvious association is that of a bloody sacrifice to the earth, but such religious ideas were very common throughout the world: even in the Americas, long before the arrival of the Europeans! And castration was also practiced in many places around the world. The link between the two are very loose.
There. I said it. It had bothered me ever since I read it on the other thread. You obviously have good knowledge of mythology; I just didn’t want to get into such a debate. But there it is: I succumbed.
Danthepoetman, I thought I was the only nerd of transsexualsim throut history and religion. I started studying it 20+ years ago to help keep me sane with being trans-attracted. Big props to you bro!
more androgyny through out history:
-greak figure aphroditus. depicted as having breast and female figure but also having a penis and beard....Aphroditus - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
-Donatello's bronze david is known for it androgynous and effeminate nature...http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_(...e_bronze_David
-leanardo da vinci's oil painting of john the baptist stood out for its unusual portrayal of st john as androgynous and feminine...http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Joh...tist_(Leonardo)
-roman historian quintus curtius rufus talks about alexander the greats eunuch lover bogoas. "Curtius maintains that Alexander also took as a lover "... Bagoas, a eunuch exceptional in beauty and in the very flower of boyhood, with whom Darius was intimate and with whom Alexander would later be intimate" (VI.5.23). "........http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/..._and_sexuality